Experience matters: unlocking and improving image description guidelines through participatory design

This project aims to develop, evaluate, and publish guidelines for making images more accessible for people with visual impairments through image descriptions. While the scientific literature on this topic is surprisingly scarce, accessibility organizations already have experience in providing descriptions for different kinds of images to benefit different kinds of users. We wish to open up this institutional knowledge, and study how current image description practices, mostly focusing on highly pragmatic image descriptions, can be improved. In this effort, we will emphasize not just the content of the descriptions, but also the usability of the guidelines for image describers (i.e. the people describing the images). In addition, we will address the full user experience of visually impaired users of the image descriptions, rather then pragmatic aspects only. We will do this through a participatory design approach in which people with visual impairments and image describers are actively involved.